Remotely operated heavier than air vehicles are used by many private and public organizations. Recently, there has been increasing interest in autonomous and semi-autonomous air vehicles. The traditional heavier than air vehicles are important tools to organizations such as the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security for surveillance of fixed and mobile interests. However, these heavier than air systems are generally limited in attainable duration and by legal and operational elevation restrictions. Heavier than air systems that are capable of long flight time or high elevation tend to be prohibitively expensive and complex. One possible solution is to employ lighter than air vehicles. Blimps and balloons have been used for many years as observation platforms and recently, some have been outfitted with remotely operable controls. However, these systems require dedicated hangers, are large and cumbersome to deploy and retrieve, are deployed in single-ship flights only, and are designed with mission specific requirements with little flexibility for field reconfiguration.
Therefore, what is needed is a flexible system of lighter than air vehicles that can be autonomously, semi-autonomously, or man-in-the-loop operated, and that are designed such that they can be deployed, serviced and retrieved from mobile platforms. Furthermore, what is needed is a flexible system in which a user can selectively choose between integrated modular subsystems to modify a vehicle for multi-purpose operations.